[HN Gopher] APL at Volvo
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APL at Volvo
Author : tosh
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-02-21 10:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dyalog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dyalog.com)
| whitej125 wrote:
| TIL APL...neat! Found this for others who want to play along.
|
| https://tryapl.org/
|
| (Note: took a while but the special characters for producing
| lists, etc... are from "virtual keys" you can see at the very top
| of the web page)
| stirfish wrote:
| I wanted to do some statistics, so I accidentally learned J
| (thinking it was R). J is like APL, but with digraphs (multiple
| characters) instead of special characters as symbols.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| Ok, so this is kind of funny but I also want to know - did/do
| you feel productive with J for stats work?
|
| Did you ever switch to R? If so, how would you describe the
| two languages to a non-programmer?
| stirfish wrote:
| I don't think I ever actually did any stats with J, but I
| did play with it for a long time.
|
| J is like an old school text adventure where you start with
| a blank screen that reads "You are in the woods" and,
| before you know it, it's Monday morning and you're
| considering calling out of work because you've _almost_
| decoded some elvish runes you found on a rock.
|
| R is the single player campaign of a modern first person
| shooter, where you have infinite lives and your health
| regenerates if you sit and think for a while.
|
| This isn't a perfect analogy. Maybe J is high school
| Spanish class, and R is Google translate? I remember
| enjoying J as a language and R as a tool. It's exciting to
| express new things in J. It's easy to do familiar things in
| R.
|
| R also is really well documented - there was a time where
| experts were asking basic questions on Stack Overflow and
| answering them themselves, because that's where people look
| for documentation.
| airstrike wrote:
| > This isn't a perfect analogy.
|
| It's pretty damn good!
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Yes. I like the wool and first personal shooter more.
| persnickety wrote:
| How does one accidentally learn a different programming
| language?
| mandarax8 wrote:
| On the J website the first sentence is: 'J is a high-level,
| general-purpose programming language that is particularly
| suited to the mathematical, statistical, and logical
| analysis of data.'
|
| So I can see him thinking he has the correct language.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Sounds like a Neal Stephenson beginning.
| kstrauser wrote:
| "The analyst's cheeks warmed as she looked around the
| room, realizing they were talking about something
| different than she expected."
| nsxwolf wrote:
| What's the story behind those characters? Did old APL machines
| have custom keyboards?
| hvs wrote:
| They weren't really "APL Machines" but computers used to run
| APL like IBM's APL2 had special keyboards like:
| https://www.clickykeyboards.com/product/1989-ibm-
| model-m-139...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Looks like Unicomp even makes a Model M with APL keycaps:
| https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/00UA41P4A
| kens wrote:
| An APL keyboard typically wasn't exactly a custom keyboard,
| but a standard keyboard with APL characters accessible
| through modifier keys. Often there were adhesive labels on
| the front of each key showing the special characters or you
| could get custom keycaps that had the special characters
| printed on the front. And of course many of the special
| characters were created through overstrike rather than
| separate keys. Way back, I programmed in APL on a DECWriter
| that had support for APL characters.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I have a keycaps set imitating the classic Space Cadet
| keyboard (from Symbolics Lisp workstations). The Space
| Cadet had APL tops and fronts [1], but these caps only have
| the tops presumably because the cost to get keycaps printed
| on the fronts would be way too high. Frustrating though.
| I've thought about getting the rest printed on clear
| plastic adhesive.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-
| cadet_keyboard#/media/Fi...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It started as notation and grew into a language. The language
| retained the notation and so we get the special symbols.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#His.
| ..
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Math student Ken Iverson being annoyed at the inconsistency
| of math notation and its precedence rules decided to come up
| with a better one. "Iverson notation" or "the notation", he
| went through Harvard and became Dr Iverson, got picked up by
| Adin Falkoff at IBM when they were designing the IBM/360
| processor and adapted the notation for the blueprints of how
| the thing would work, and then got rid of superscripts and
| subscripts and cut it down a little so it could become a
| line-based executable thing to run on an IBM/360 as a kind of
| matrix-aware desktop calculator / "A Programming Language"
| (APL). IBM made custom Selectric/golf-ball printer heads and
| keyboard overlays for it.
| riskable wrote:
| They're "space runes" from ancient alien civilizations that
| allowed humans to briefly glimpse their technology.
| airstrike wrote:
| https://spkeyboards.com/collections/semiotic-keycaps
| gnabgib wrote:
| Server seems to be struggling? Found it in the wayback:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210805225407/https://www.dyalo...
| mlochbaum wrote:
| "Who uses APL in production?" is a common question. These days,
| it's mostly those who haven't stopped using it. The historical
| use, while never quite mainstream, might be surprising to those
| who never realized APL had a commercial presence at all!
|
| - APL conferences were held every year from 1969 to 2004, minus
| '77 and '78 due to some unfortunate logistical issues (certainly
| not lack of demand). Conferences in the 80s regularly had >1000
| in attendance despite both IPSA and STSC holding their own many
| years. My count (may not entirely rule out duplicates) is >1000
| paper authors, and far more papers were submitted than accepted.
| https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL_conference
|
| - At least a dozen hardware manufacturers implemented an APL for
| their systems in the mainframe and minicomputer era (70s and
| 80s): https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Vendors
|
| - Usage stats from just one university in 1978: 7,300 active
| accounts and 5,400 workspaces (which would each store an
| individual project, or something like that). Used for all sorts
| of administration and even a student ride sharing service. Today
| of course, much of this would be done in Excel.
| https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Syracuse_University
|
| - The first serious e-mail system was implemented in APL in 1972,
| and used by Jimmy Carter in 1976 for his presidential campaign:
| https://forums.dyalog.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1629
|
| - I've heard but can't verify that one of the APL books (Gilman
| and Rose maybe) sold over 100,000 copies.
| bloaf wrote:
| I've seen APL in use in industry for industrial simulation
| tools. I thought it was a pretty cool technical decision
| because of how good APL is at exactly the kind of vector math
| they were doing (I even offered to join their team just for a
| chance to learn APL.) Unfortunately, they were a little _too_
| excited about APL and went and built a bunch of APL GUIs on top
| of their simulations, which were giving them huge maintenance
| headaches.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of complicated GUIs or practically any GUIs
| to be honest. Their complexity is vast and code wise, they
| often make up a majority or at least very significant part of
| an application. I get it if you're selling a product, but if
| it's just an internal tool, I find it's usually just not
| worth it in the long run.
| wglb wrote:
| This is a good project story.
|
| Note that as in many high-throughput applications, non-gui
| solutions dominate, such as the 3270-like systems.
|
| A securities firm in Chicago called "Security APL" used APL as
| their internal language. It appears that the code was made into a
| product and is in use today:
| https://www.waterstechnology.com/management-strategy/1607440...
| croemer wrote:
| (2012)
| systems wrote:
| whats going on with volvo, they also recently made a job post for
| clojure, and now this
|
| someone need to investigate their IT department
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Volvo has used APL for ages, so I don't think there is anything
| weird about it. Someone just found the old case study on
| Dyalog's website from years ago and posted it I believe. It
| makes sense to me as it is a language suited for business
| folks. The Clojure needs are likely for an entirely different
| system.
| spit2wind wrote:
| Is that 425,000 lines of APL?!
| webel0 wrote:
| Yeah, I wonder if that is 425k _formatted_ lines of APL? I'm
| blanking: wasn't there someone who wrote their hedge fund's
| entire data processing pipeline in 4 lines of APL?
| cduzz wrote:
| Characters maybe?
| rak1507 wrote:
| Most "production" APL is pretty verbose. See
| https://github.com/Dyalog/Jarvis/blob/master/Source/Jarvis.d...
| for example
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Funny. In another thread on here a few days ago, someone asked if
| anyone used APL in production and I mentioned Volvo and posted
| this link.
| shrumm wrote:
| This website is pure nostalgia <3, pretty much every corporate
| page in the 90s looked like this! I was half disappointed they're
| using <div>'s and CSS for layout and not a bunch of <table>'s.
| rak1507 wrote:
| In case anyone is curious about if the system is still used 12
| years later, the latest thing I could find was from a job advert
| https://app.verama.com/job-requests/40623
|
| "This application is built in using Dialog[sic] APL which is a
| niche language and has its own challenge and that's where second
| application Apollo comes into the picture which is created by
| another team Atlas aiming to create the Hercules using updated
| tech stack together with new functionalities."
|
| Seems like it's being replaced.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| 425,000 lines of APL code boggles the mind. It's like 10,000
| pages filled with APL symbols. I guess that for normal non-APL
| programmers it's as close to an inscrutable alien artifact as you
| can find on Earth.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Future historians may spend centuries trying to decode the
| Volvo Manuscript ;)
| pavlov wrote:
| An LLM can probably explain and translate it reliably. A
| model trained on the Internet has seen quite a lot of code
| and documentation about APL and its relatives.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Oh I'm sure. I was just trying to be funny. Although aren't
| you assuming we won't have a large amount of knowledge loss
| in the upcoming centuries.
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(page generated 2024-02-22 23:00 UTC)